Astronauts & Shelves

Featured toy of the day: little plastic astronauts & planets from a tube. We built a little perimeter fence around the space ships & astronauts from the IKEA wooden blocks in a cart, placed planets outside the perimeter, and did the countdown for each space ship (5-4-3-2-1-0-go!). 2-yr-old A. didn't care, so he built a little tower; 3.5-yr-old L. did the countdown with gusto and flew space ships (shuttle, satellite, rocket, etc) one each to different planets.

Of course, given that they're kids and enjoy the cheapest entertainment best, they spent the rest of the evening playing with parts of the bookshelf I was fixing. A while back I half-built them a children's bookshelf. I wanted to cut off the sharp edges off the sides in view of our playdate on Sunday replete with 2-year-olds. So I disassembled the shelf and placed the horizontal parts on our couch so they would be out of the way. The kids spent fifteen minutes or so pretending they're rails and shoving all sorts of things on and under them.